


kiss all your saviours

by eudaimon



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-22
Updated: 2013-11-22
Packaged: 2018-01-02 09:04:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,962
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1054947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eudaimon/pseuds/eudaimon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the revolution, not everybody who died in the Capitol stayed dead; Johanna's always struggled to ask help.</p>
            </blockquote>





	kiss all your saviours

**Author's Note:**

> Contains MAJOR SPOILERS for events in Catching Fire/Mockingjay. Based on book canon, so may differ from movie interpretations.
> 
> It could have ended like this. I think it could.

_“I almost had a pair of your gloves, once,” he says._  
“Almost?”  
“Long story.” 

*

After everything is said and done, over bar the shouting and the taste of ashes, the remembers seeing him three times. Once, on the T.V during the 74th games, a tribute's 'cousin', stiff-jawed and stoic and not saying much at all. Twice, dancing at Finnick and Annie's wedding, his head thrown back and laughing. And then the third and final, on the day two presidents died, sitting on a curb stone with his heavy head cradled in his hands and his bow and arrows at his feet. There must have been other times in 13, passing each other in corridors, sitting in the same room - didn't she see him standing in a doorway once? - but those are the times that he stuck in her mind: Gale Hawthorne, Katniss Everdeen's cousin, not scared of anything and incredibly handsome and not even a cousin at all.

It's surprising, to realise that there's a part of her still capable of feeling pleased that somebody survived.

She doesn't see him to speak to for a long time after that, after that last day in the Capitol when all the babies burned. District 2 has a quiet, beaten down feeling, but Johanna Mason can understand that - it's a shitty, shitty thing to lose everything you believe in, to be beaten into submission and kept that way through fear. What must it have felt like, to stand back and watch that mountain fall? Not for the first time, Johanna spits and thinks _fuck you, Katniss Everdeen_.

She wipes her nose on her sleeve and smells smoke.  
 _Fuck you, Girl on Fire._

*

There are trees on the southward facing slope of the Nut. It makes sense that she'd find herself there. There's so little that she understands any more, but she still understands how things grow and, in growing, change. She's supposed to be here; where else would she be?

She isn't expecting him, though.

The tree was easy to climb, the fork in the branches neat and snug. She feels safe and collected for the first time in a long time, since the last time that she saw Finnick, probably. She hadn't realised how few people left in the world touched her until Finnick was suddenly gone and there was no-one left to touch her at all. She leans into the tree like it has arms. She wonders if he sees her.

If he does, it doesn't show.

He's low to the ground, down on one knee, an arrow already drawn. The short soldier's hair-cut has grown out and his hair tumbles across his forehead, slick and black. There's beard shadowing his jaw. He doesn't move. He barely breathes. He never went near an arena but he reminds her of a tribute, anyway; she half closes her eyes and imagines that long arrow piercing a slim throat.

When she opens her eyes, he's looking at her.

“Johanna Mason,” he says, quietly.   
“Hello, Gale.”

He lets the arrow drop to rest, point first, against his thigh.

*

She makes him coffee. He looks out of place in her tiny kitchen, coat slung over the back of one of the chairs, boots dutifully toed off at the door. Bearded and impossibly tall. She watches him make a tiny snare out a piece of string, loops and sliding knots. His hands are strong and beautiful; the knots remind her of Finnick. She wonders what Annie will name the baby when he's born.

The coffee is terrible. They do not talk about Katniss Everdeen.

*

She takes him dancing. He strips down out of his winter layers, ends up in trousers than ride low on his hips and a thin black shirt that reminds her of how he looked in Thirteen. His hair makes a soft wing across his eyes. She watches him move, the way he jumps and pulses, the scuff of his boots and the sheen of sweat on his face and his limbs. The dancers here are different than either of them grew up with; the music from Twelve is all fiddles and drums and she remembers her father carving wooden flutes when she was just a kid.

Not for the first time, it occurs to her how much this kind of dancing is like fucking, the way the sweat rises and stings, the way their bodies can't help but move in time.

She reaches out and catches him by the wrist. He steps closer, chest heaving and she reaches up to brush the sweaty curtain of his hair back from his eyes.

“Walk me home.”  
“What?”  
“I'm done here. Walk me home.”

She's a Victor, and there are different kinds of scars and many different kinds of hurting and he reminds her of Finnick dancing like a mad thing in Capitol clubs and now, as the lone survivor (lonely, too) she reserves the right to be mercurial. Just let someone try and tell her no - she what happens. The mood she's in, she'd eat their fucking hearts.

Instead, she cups the back of his neck and draws him down for a kiss.  
Bites. Draws blood.

But only a little.

*

In the middle of the night she finds him in the kitchen, underwear low on his ass and a cup of coffee cradled between his hands. Now that she's got time, she can take in the ways that he isn't quite perfect, the long scar down one side, little scuffs, little stains. One side of his face flushes quicker than the others, the echo of a burn. She reaches out and touches the most obvious mark with her thumb, the one high on his shoulder, wonders how deeply the coal-dust is rubbed into his bones.

“How'd this one happen?” she asks him  
“The rescue,” he says, and he means her and Annie Odair but mainly Peeta (and fuck Enobaria, too). He shrugs. “I fell.”

She bends and presses a kiss to the back of his neck under the curling ends of his hair.

“Come back to bed,” she says.

It's easier to breathe lying on her back with him slid between her knees, contained on three sides by his weight. He lies on top of her, an arm on the pillow on either side of her head, and she traces her fingers along the hidden bones of his spine.

“I couldn't walk,” she says. “Somebody carried me.”  
“It wasn't me,” he says.

She doesn't care. She grips his wrists and pushes his hands up over his head. He tightens like a bowstring.

*

It's raining, absolutely pouring down, and her heart doesn't know which way to go. It aches in her chest like a wound. They get hold of her at the office but she doesn't go home. In Two, there are deep gutters and she misjudges the step down from a curb and ends up soaked to the knee. Her hair is plastered against her skull. Her coat is doing her no good at all. She was born in Seven, where the trees are thick. She grew up sheltered by thick green leaves.

She'll leave dreams of drowning to Annie Odair.

She hammers at his door with both fists. For a sick, horrible moment, she thinks that he isn't home. She realises that she wouldn't have anywhere else to go.

But he opens the door. He's tousled and yawning, just woken up. Dimly, she remembers an all-night debate of something political; she remembers Gale sitting on a couch with his head tilted to one side surrounded by people older and greyer than him. How beautiful he'd seemed - how distant.

He's looking at her and frowning. It takes her a moment to realise that she's crying, fat ugly tears rolling down her cheeks.

“What?” he says, still frowning.

She shakes her head. For a moment, she can't put it into words. He reaches out and takes her by the wrist. He draws her inside.

“I need you to come with me.”  
“Where?”

She covers her face with one hand and, for a moment, just trembles. He still has hold of her wrist.

“They found him,” she says. “We thought he was dead.”  
She forces each word out, small between fingers.

“Who?” he asks and his hand slips over her hair. It's a little disgusting how comforting so small a gesture can be. 

“Cinna.” she says and she can tell that he recognises the name but, then again, of course he does; it was Cinna who first set the girl on fire so of course Gale Hawthorne remembers his name when he was always burning for her, too.

Johanna's not half as stupid as she pretends to be.

Gale's nodding, strong and stubborn and exactly what she needs him to be right then. He says something about fetching his bag. She brushes his hair back from his eyes.  
Really, she just wants to have something to do with her hands.

*

It doesn't make sense to her at all, in the end. There's nothing that she recognises; she has no point of reference. Automatically, she's stored him alongside Finnick in her memory, lithe and lovely like things cast out of bronze, quick tongued and clever handed and best thought of in the context of limbs tangled in a wide, white bed.

Which is why none of it rings true when he's so thin that she can see his ribs through taut, ashy skin and his eyes have an ugly, bruised look.

“Fuck, Cinna,” she says, smoothing one hand over his so-short hair (she still keeps her own short after all of this time, even if the sound of clippers always leaves her shaken and sick). “I know you never followed fashion but this is beyond a joke.”

He laughs. He almost laughs.  
In the doorway, Gale is dark and silent and solid and there.

Cinna turns his face and presses a kiss against her palm. She remembers lying cradled between two bodies, two hands skimming along her side, their fingers meeting with a brush. She remembers his breath against the nape of her neck.

“How long was I down there?” he asks her.  
“A million years,” she tells him. “No time at all.”

She bends her head and catches his mouth with hers.  
And there it is. That kiss is a landmark.

*

All kisses are landmarks; they keep finding their way back. They feed Cinna rich, good tasting things. She wears Gale's shirts but spends a lot of time in Cinna's bed, bare-legged, his head against her chest. He draws but his hand shakes.

Slowly, the lines become legible.  
Gradually, he puts on healthy weight.

They do not talk about what happened to him. Revolution is not a word any more. Peeta sends letters; he doesn't mention Katniss, but she's present. Reading those letters, Gale grows odd and distant. He removes himself and she watches him walk down the road towards the thickly wooded hills with his bow in his hand.

It's Cinna who helps, in the end. They talk about her in hushed voices; they remember and Johanna doesn't pretend to understand. She likes Katniss, she learned to like her, but so many things went wrong. _Fuck you, Katniss,_ she thinks. _Fuck you, girl on fire._

There's not as much feeling in it as she used to be as she watches the way that Cinna brushes Gale's hair out of his eyes. As Gale makes a delicate, beautiful snare of broken silver chain.

From the doorway, she watches them kiss. Cinna leans in; Gale doesn't pull away.

It's a way back to somewhere that she's never been.

*

She turns his face with her fingers on his chin and delicately paints gold along the rim of each wide-open eye. 


End file.
